Malignant tumors are diseases severely threatening human health. Chemotherapy continues to be an essential therapy for tumor treatments. Developing newly effective anti-tumor drug against effective anti-tumor targets is an important way to achieve effective tumor chemotherapy. Microtubules and tubulin are important anti-tumor targets, and representative drugs in clinic include paclitaxel, vinblastine, vincristine and the like. Paclitaxel promotes the aggregation of tubulin to form microtubules while the latters inhibit aggregation of tubulin, thereby disrupting mitosis to attain an effect of anti-tumor. Although drugs based on paclitaxel and vinblastine have been used in clinic, these drugs suffer some disadvantage factors including the rare resource, complex synthesis, high price or the like. Meanwhile, some molecules have been found to initiate tumor resistance.
Moreover, poor physical properties such as poor solubility exist in most of such molecules, which limits such drugs in clinical use. To overcome these drawbacks, it is important to design drugs with new structures, high activities, high bio-security and good physical properties for achieving microtubule targeted anti-tumor treatments.
A biaryl structure, for example bifendate, is a pharmacophore exists in natural products and various anti-tumor compounds with biaryl structure were literaturally reported. Chalcone compounds are widely found in nature and its basic skeleton structure is 1,3-diphenylcyclopropenone. Chalcone has been found to have activities including anti-inflammatory, anti-angiogenic, anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, anti-tumor activity and the like. It can be also used as optical recording materials, antidepressants and the like. However, naturally occurring chalcones still have drawbacks including low selectivity, generally low activity and the like. Highly active molecules which based on the structural model of chalcone with structural modifications has gained wide attention.